The Age of Commercialism

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

A Masterpiece!

The is a good film about probably the biggest upset in football history - certainly it is viewed that way in the UK. In 1950 England's football team was regarded as the number one team in the world. They had never competed in the World Cup because they viewed it as beneath them in some way (as did the other British teams). England had never been defeated by foreign (non British) opposition on home soil, so they were a tad arrogant.This is an interesting film about football history. The game very much in its infancy in America, starts in St. Louis where the manager scouts a set of amateur players to play for the national team. Gerard Butler plays the goal keeper Frank Borghi, which in a bad team, turns out to be the hero, and Wes Bentley plays team captain Walter Bahr. Interestingly the team captain had a much bigger role than they have today. He was involved in team selection and tactics. The Americans realise early on they are likely to get a hiding from the more experienced professional teams, but that is where the emotion of the film comes in as the team bond around the hero goal keeper and team captain. Probably because this is a really embarrassing moment in England's football history, and America's ambivalence towards the game, explains why it has taken 60 odd years for this story to come to the big screen. The period details, and sports action looked authentic and the big finale is a highlights coverage of the famous game. The acting is fine all round. As a football fan this is an entertaining and informative film. I've only ever seen black and photographs of the this game so it great to see a film which fills in the full story. 8/10.

The story of the 1950 United States World Cup soccer team's stunning upset victory over England is one which has been begging to be told for years. One of the great sports underdog stories of all time and hardly anyone knows a thing about it. Many younger American soccer fans don't even know it happened. Finally, this movie has come along to shed some well-deserved light on those players who toiled mostly in anonymity and whose achievements seemed lost in the dustbin of history. It is wonderful that this movie was made. You just wish the movie had been made better. The Game of Their Lives or The Miracle Match or whatever they're calling it these days never quite hits the heights. It tells a story which needed to be told. It just doesn't tell it in an entertaining enough way.This movie is cut from the tried and true sports underdog movie mold (Hoosiers, Rocky, Rudy and so on) but it never has the same sense of energy which drove those films forward. While those films had a certain zest to them as they built towards a thrilling conclusion this film just kind of slogs along. It's not nearly as engrossing as it could have, and given the great story they had to work with, probably should have been. The fact that certain details of history have been twisted and changed to try to make things seem more dramatic than they actually were doesn't help either. A misguided attempt to create a "villain" on the English team also falls flat. It seems the filmmakers were afraid to allow this story to speak for itself and were determined to spice it up with some artificial drama. The fake drama doesn't work and we're not left with enough real drama either.This is not to say that The Game of Their Lives (or The Miracle Match or whatever) is a bad movie. It's OK. You just get the sense that this story deserved a movie which is better than just OK. The acting is fine with Gerard Butler and Wes Bentley the key figures in a cast which otherwise is made up of mostly unknowns with the exception of, oh sweet irony, Englishman Patrick Stewart as the American soccer reporter who serves as the film's narrator while relishing the memory of the English defeat. The visuals are very good and the soccer scenes quite well done. But what's lacking is drama. The film never really grabs you, from the "getting to know you" phase as we meet the players all the way through the "thrilling" climax which comes off as rather ordinary. And what the U.S. team achieved in Brazil in 1950 was anything but ordinary. Unfortunately the full impact of what those men accomplished and who those men really were doesn't come across in this film. And that's a shame.

this is a good movie for football fans to watch just before the biggest show in football kicks off, i.e. the 2006 World Cup.. no stars in this movie apart from Patrick Stewart but it bodes p well.. v similar to World's Fastest Indian if not as good but it does give ya a glimpse of the perceptions of football in those days when England still considered themselves to be the masters of the game they invented..in fact, the original result hardly made headlines back in England.. the English just didn't care about the World Cup until 1962, the last tournament before they would host it.. to the English, the World Cup was a joke as they still thought themselves to be the undisputed World Champions of the world..of course, history tells us that England has only won the World Cup once when they were hosts in 1966 with a team as talented but more adept to the changes in world football than the one which lost to the USA in 1950.. as for the USA, they only made the World Cup again in 1990 before they hosted the tournament in 1994..in the movie there is no mention about how the Americans had to qualify for the World Cup beating the likes of Guatemala and Mexico, nor about how they had to beat Spain to progress to the second round of the tournament.. but i guess the one result that everyone remembers is that game against England in beautiful Belo Horizonte and how they beat the team that called themselves the World Champions before a ball had been kicked.hopefully in a couple of years time, they might make a movie about another shock win by the Americans at a World Cup tournament 52 years later, when they beat a Portugal team full of stars 3-2..

Certainly there have been sports films that were more technically unacceptable to this one, but never in the history of celluloid has so much carelessness for a true account been displayed on the silver screen. "The Game of Their Lives" is a revolting untrue story of the United States' 1950 World Cup upset of England. Having read the book the film is loosely )and I do mean loosely based on), the story plays on film like a made-for-Disney Sunday night TV movie. The half truths in this debacle start right from the outset as the St. Louis playground team gets notice of a World Cup tryout. The World Cup in 1950 was not the World Cup of today. It was only the fourth tournament, and first since 1938. For the players to suggest at that point in time that World Cup was considered the greatest sporting event in the world was for all intents and purposes false. The glamor and glitz associated with the World Cup did not come until later. According to the book, there wasn't much of a St. Louis-New York rivalry. It wasn't like the 1980 Olympic hockey team with its Minnesota-Boston rivalry. The players, if I remember correctly, came together without much fuss and did their job. The preoccupation with Stanley Mortensen is a mystery too. Did I hear correctly during the banquet introduction speech where he was introduced as scoring three goals in the FA Cup final in 1950? Sorry. That didn't happen until three years later. The book also said nothing about a scathing Mortensen speech. I highly doubt it would be in any player's nature to stand up and directly insult a team which had no chance of making an impact. And...The USA did NOT open the 1950 World Cup against England. They lost 3-1 to Spain a mere four days earlier, playing well against another good side. That game probably illustrated that the Americans weren't exactly a rag-tag bunch more than the England one, but the filmmakers didn't mention it. Or the 5-2 loss to Chile which ended the Yanks tournament. And guess what? After all the excitement made over topping England, the U.S.A. finished last in the group. England only picked up two points (a win was worth two points back then and not three) against Chile. So, the win over England might have been more of a story of a fading power than a miraculous upset. The crux of the book was the players relationship to their families and athletics. It only gets a basic treatment in the film. As for Haitian goal scorer Joe Gaetjens, the filmmakers treat his character like a right loon who is deeply under the spell of voodoo. It's laughable and racist to some degree in how he is portrayed. There also is no discussion of his life after he scores a goal. The film suddenly ends after the win. Sure we get to see the remaining remembers of the real team get a nod at the 2004 MLS All-Star game, but what about the others? Joe, I'm afraid wasn't one of them as he was kidnapped and killed in Haiti for political reasons in the 1960s. Why wasn't that in the film? The absolute worst part of the film was the presentation of the uniforms. (First of all, was not the constant begging for uniforms like the Bad News Bears a bit pathetic?) A general or some high-ranking military schmoe presents the players with the new uniforms on a tarmac in Brazil. What we get here is some of the most vile military to sports comparisons you'll ever see. It's the kind of stuff that makes you curl up and wonder what other countries will think when they see it. In fact, the whole movie is.